Imagination launches powerful $65 Raspberry Pi competitor

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Imagination Technologies has been supplying Apple with GPUs for their iOS devices for years. Now they’re ready to offer a MIPS-based dev board to makers who want to tinker with a PowerVR processor.

At $65, the MIPS Creator CI20 is nearly double the cost of a Raspberry Pi B+, but you’re also getting a whole lot more hardware. Imagination’s dev board packs a much more powerful 1.2GHz dual-core processor, twice the RAM (1GB), and 4GB of onboard storage.

The CI20 also features a PowerVR SGX540 GPU. While it’s not the most current graphics chip on the market, it still provides plenty of pixel-processing muscle. It’s the same GPU that Samsung chose for the 2010 Galaxy S, and it’s more than capable of pushing 1080p video at 60fps via the board’s HDMI port.

Imagination also provides additional connectivity options right out of the box: the CI20 supports Bluetooth 4.0 and complements 10/100 Ethernet with 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi. The Raspberry Pi B+ does have more USB ports; the MIPS Creator CI20 only has two full-sized USB ports for your peripherals, but at least you won’t be wasting either of them plugging in a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi dongle. Imagination is also throwing in a 5V power supply — which isn’t always the case with low-cost dev boards.

Like the Pi, Imagination has chosen Debain as the default OS for their new dev board. You should be able to run any MIPS32 compatible Linux apps on it (including XBMC if you want to use it as a set-top box), but if you’d prefer to play with Android on the CI20 Imagination has that covered. You can download Android 4.4.2 from their site, but you’ll need to set up a build environment so that you can compile it yourself.

For $65, the MIPS Creator CI20 is an impressive little dev board that’ll be available in January. It’ll get even better as developers port additional apps over. Pixel Hero Games have already gotten Unreal Engine 3 running on it, so there should be plenty of awesome games on the way, too.